I’m starting a new category of posts, to be called “CFP's” (Call for Papers), in which I’ll be posting actual CFP’s drawn primarily from university English Depts. What’s that you say? You thought English Depts actually studied literature and weren’t postmodern, far left, agenda-laden, thoroughly politicized circle jerks? Think again.

While I realize it technically improper for me to use CFP's instead of CFPs, I'm nonetheless stuck on the former's aesthetics. The first installment of CFP's is a lengthy one, but leaps with colors of identity politics and is bountiful with gems of irrelevancy. The last entry, in particular, takes navel-gazing to a literal level (perhaps a post-recontextualized, self-reflexive, Lacanian meta-voyeuristic bit of irony on the part of the writer? Or just total frivolity? Or both at once?)

Below is the first installment of CFP. Give 'em your best post-structuralist, transgendered, neo-psychoanalytic, hermeneutic deconstructions!

• CFP: The Fetishists, Masochists, and Other Sexual Dissidents of Romanticism - Proposals are now being accepted for the thirteenth annual conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, "Deviance and Defiance," to be held in Montreal, Canada, 13-17 August 2005. Special session: "The Fetishists, Masochists, and Other Sexual Dissidents of Romanticism". Papers are solicited that would broaden the notion, beyond adultery and onanism, of what was considered transgressive sexual behavior: possibilities include doll fetishism, hypnoticism and s/m, incestuous pleasures, and cross-dressing erotic encounters. In this post-Sadean but pre-Masochian era, what would or would not have been counted as sexual perversion in the public, medical, or legal eye? How do matters of sexual unorthodoxy inform notions of privacy and personal subjectivity? In what contexts were private vices regarded as socially subversive?

• CFP: Utopian Gender Space Special Session (2/15/05; SCMLA, 10/27/05-10/29/05) - It's Always Greener: Utopian Gender Space - This session invites papers that explore the geography of gender in/equality and its socio-spatial implications, particularly in utopian literature.

• CFP: "Queers and Religious Rhetoric in Contemporary America", Sponsored Session of the Gay/Lesbian Caucus for the Modern Languages, MLA Convention 2005, Washington DC. December 27-30, 2005. Papers sought regarding any intersection of queerness and religious discourse in contemporary culture. While proposals on Christianity are welcome and encouraged, we are actively seeking considerations of other religions, especially those querying race and ethnicity.

• CFP: Gender, The Lexicon, and "Sexuality" and the Renaissance - This call for papers is for a proposed panel to be held at (dis)junctions: theory reloaded at the University of California, Riverside's 12th Annual Interdisciplinary Humanities Graduate Conference on April 8-9, 2005. Judith Butler writes in Undoing Gender that "The norm governs intelligibility, allows for certain kinds of practices and action to become recognizable as such, imposing a grid of legibility on the social and defining the parameters of what will and will not appear within the domain of the social". When thinking of Renaissance and earlier texts in particular, many have articulated, one way or another, that there needs to be a language not colored by the psychoanalytic and sexological lexicons. The Renaissance…leaves current scholarship founded in more contemporary conceptions of gender, "sexuality," and post-structuralism at a loss for comprehending this "grid" that gender norms make available. What language(s) shaped the language of gender in the Renaissance? Are there claims to universality, in terms of gender, for the Renaissance and further on in time? What are the implications of "universality" and should there even be a foray into gender universals? Can we begin to challenge post-structuralist theory to work without its current radar when we talk about gender and "sexuality" in the Renaissance, and, if so, how? Can there be temporal constraints on theory at all? Is it impossible for post-structuralist theory to exist outside of its current mapping? Interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged. Topics concerning particularly Renaissance and Restoration texts are encouraged, but critics working with older texts will not be turned away.

• CFP: Negotiating Gender: New Perspectives on Asian American Literary Studies - This proposed collection of essays intends to tackle a fundamental issue in Asian American literary studies, the gender gap, i.e. a fission roughly along gender lines in Asian American thinking and articulation about ethnic identity. Ever since the early 1970s, Asian American feminists and nationalists have been engaged in a heated exchange on the roles of gender, race, and culture in the formation of an Asian American identity, with gender being the defining element. While the debate has invigorated Asian American critical discourse, the prolonged warring atmosphere has also divided Asian American community. In recent years, scholars such as King-Kok Cheung, Sau-ling Wong, and Jinqi Ling have sought to move beyond gender opposition in Asian American thinking and practice. This move is in line with critical developments in recent gender and race theories, masculinity studies, and queer studies. While we are aware of the pitfalls of "essentialized ethnicity" in Judith Butler’s and bell hook’s sense, we are also eager for the possibility of negotiations toward a "coalitional politics." We would like to see essays that explore new perspectives on Asian American self-definition and identity in the spirit of gender reconciliation rather than gender opposition.

• CFP: Envisioning the Color Line: Literature, Race, and the Visual (3/1/05; NEASA, 9/23/05-9/24/05) - Seeking submissions for a proposed session entitled "Envisioning the Color Line: Literature, Race, and the Visual," to be presented at the 2005 conference of the New England American Studies Association (NEASA) in Worcester, MA (September 23-24). Papers should address the ways American writer' use visual tropes to represent the color line, and/or the ways they challenge the visual basis upon which racial categories are built.

• CFP: Dangerous Looks and Visual Pleasure: African American Writers and Filmmakers and The Gaze - This call for papers is for a proposal panel to be held at (dis)junctions: theory reloaded at the University of California Riverside’s 12th Annual Humanities Graduate Conference on April 8-9, 2005. The gaze, writes bell hooks, provides “spaces of agency for Black people, wherein [they] can both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what [they] see. The ‘gaze’ has been and is a site of resistance for colonized Black people globally.” This panel will seek to explore the diverse ways that the gaze has been depicted by African American writers and filmmakers. The dichotomy of voyeur and exhibitionist will be called into question, as well as the resulting power dynamics that these looking relations entail and cultivate. Papers that explore how the gaze may be complicated or disrupted as a result of racial passing, lesbian/bisexuality, and female asquerade/performativity are especially welcomed. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
  

1) An analysis of gazes shared between women. Queer gazes, gazes in queer spaces. The gaze as a tool of racial coding. The ways in which racial passing or female asquerade complicate looking relations. Performativity of race, gender, and class and its relation to the gaze.

2) Looking at ‘Others’ as a tool of identity construction. Conversely, the psychological affect of the gaze of the other. White gazes on black bodies, gazes between black men and black women. Classed gazes.

3) The ways in which specific theories regarding black spectatorship affect the interactions between characters in the text. Ways of looking that are coded specifically as black. The visual relationship between the reader/viewer and characters. Film theory and the African American novel.

4) Disrupting the gaze: discontinuous filmmaking, fragmentized narratives. Manipulating the gaze of the reader/viewer.

5) Scopophilia, fetishism, psychoanalysis, portraiture. Artistic renderings of the gaze. Black women and man as visual icons. Voyeurism and exhibitionism as potential sites of agency.

"Scopophilia"? I had to go to the Pomo Dictionary for that one: "SCOPOPHILIA: Literally, the love of looking. The term refers to the predominantly male gaze of Holloywood [sic] cinema, which enjoys objectfying [sic] women into mere objects to be looked at (rather than subjects with their own voice and subjectivity). The term, as used in feminist film criticism, is heavily influenced by both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis."

Glad I just wasted 60 irretrievable seconds of my life looking that one up.

PS: To hell with the analytic-synthetic distinction or whether there is a latent civilizational battle taking place between Western values and non-Western values, I think I'm going to pour my resources and energies into the post-Sadean/pre-Masochian binary. Precisely where along this continuum were hermaphrodite, Parisian cross-dressers during the 1730's oriented?